Welcome to another installment of Failed-Project Friday, now on tumblr!
Circa 1997, I was in the midst of my first work for Wildstorm, writing and drawing the three-issue âGrunge! The Movieâ arc on the kinda-sorta anthology series Gen13: Bootleg. (Yes, folks, at one time Gen13 was so popular that it boasted a separate title for other creators to write and draw stories of Fairchild and friends.) At the same time, I was flailing desperately about to line up a crossoverâany crossoverâbetween my version of the Dirty Pair and some other, more popular book, in an attempt to boost the DPâs profile and earn some sweet mainstream page rates in the process. As I was working on both books at the time, a Gen13/ Dirty Pair crossover seemed like an obvious idea to pitchâŚÂ
So I dusted off the antagonists and premise from yet another defunct project, a 1993-ish Marvel miniseries proposal titled âX-Force: Junk Mail.â This old concept involved nanotech salesman from the far future traveling back in time to conduct a wildly bizarre and incredibly violent infomercial/ sales pitch on X-Forceâs hapless mutants. (If I ever dig up the art from that proposal, Iâll post that here.) Suffice it to say that, in this variation on the idea, Kei and Yuri also go back in time and team up with three of Gen13âs members to battle an ultra-tech enemy whose âinfomercialâ soon spirals completely out of control. (Once again, poor Sarah and Bobby got shafted out of an appearance, as I didnât want a seven-member set of protagonists; the DPâs rarely appearing feline companion Mughi was likewise omitted.)
Well, not surprisingly, the pitch received no interest from Wildstorm, and that was the end of that crossover proposal. Turned out this would be one of many, many failed attempts on my part to get a Dirty Pair crossover off the ground⌠Dirty Pair/ Superman, Dirty Pair/ Predator, Dirty Pair/ Aliens (just kidding, that wouldâve been too much like the DP Project Eden movie), even Dirty Pair/ Buffy the Vampire Slayer (okay, I never even formally proposed that one). Oh, well.